


The Undertide

by Selden



Category: Sir Orfeo (Poem)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-30
Updated: 2015-10-30
Packaged: 2018-04-28 21:55:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5107100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selden/pseuds/Selden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fairyland gets under your skin.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Undertide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quillori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/gifts).



> 'Undertide', or 'undrentide' is a Middle English word meaning, roughly, any time from six in the morning to noon. Queen Herodis has her foreboding dream while sleeping in the undertide.

When my lord king came back after ten empty years, I was so happy I thought my heart might break. He came to the court in high summer, in the guise of a beggar, his beard down to his waist and his skin as coarse as tree-bark, wearing filthy rags. On his back was the same harp he had left with, after his wife the queen had been stolen away by the king of Fairy. He had gone off to live heartsore in the wild woods, leaving the kingdom in my hands. But now none of us recognised him, he was so changed.

It was a test of my trueness, for he played on his harp in the great hall, standing down amongst the musicians and sending music up through the smoky air like shafts of sunlight. And when I recognised that harp, he told me that the man who had owned it was dead.

I wept for my lord king, of course, and he came and stood before the dais.

“Now, steward,” he said, “Listen to this. If I was king Orfeo, and had suffered much in the wilderness, and had won my own wife away out of the land of Fairy, and had brought the fair lady back right here, waiting for me on the outskirts of town, if I was king Orfeo and had come thus wretched before you to make a test of your good will, and if I found you thus true, you would never regret it.”

I wiped my eyes and stared at his face.

“But if you had been glad of my death,” he said softly, “You would have regretted it indeed.”

I knew him then, and in my haste to reach him I tipped the table off its trestles, so that I fell at his feet with the loud clatter still ringing in my ears, and the dogs pushing past us to get to the meat. The board had caught my leg as it went over, and a great sweet ache was setting up in my thigh. Later the bruise would come up purple as the lip of a seashell.

People were crying out all around us that the lord king had returned. He put his hand on my head for a moment, then raised me up by the shoulders and kissed my cheeks.

“You will be king after I am gone, my faithful steward,” he said, for all the hall to hear.

 

Then there was a great deal of bustle and excitement, then, as we carried him off to his room to give him a bath and shave his matted beard, which fell away in rank clumps. His skin was paler under it, so that for the first week or so of his new reign he looked always quite white round the lips, like a man with a wound. Back then we were simply glad to see his face, not so very changed after all. We dressed him in robes fit for a king, purple and cloth of gold.

And as I was kneeling to slip his rings on his worn fingers, I ventured to say something that had been weighing on my mind. "You do me great honour, my lord," I said. "But you may yet have sons who will bear the crown after you, God willing. Promise the crown to me if you will, but only in the absence of such a child."

"Ah, my dear steward," he said to me. "I have dealt enough in absence, don't you think? And the barons bear you loyalty, it is plain to see. I would be foolish indeed to cast aside such a man."

"As you will, my lord," I said. But as I looked down at where the rings came up in great tall settings from his skinny brown fingers, glinting with gemstone nodules like the inside of a cave, I felt my eyes fill again with tears, though I could not have said why.

 

A little later, when we were assembling the procession which would fetch the queen and bring her home, I asked him how he had found her and won her back from the land of Fairy. As it turned out, he had come before that court like a beggar too, or at least like a wandering minstrel singing for his supper. And he had sung so sweetly and played his harp so finely that the king of fairyland himself had promised him whatever he desired.

"So I asked for her," he said, smiling. "I asked for the beautiful lady sleeping under the ympe-tree."

An ympe-tree is a tree grafted on to old root-stock. All apple trees must be grafted thus, if they are to grow true. It was under such a tree that queen Herodis, sleeping one hot forenoon while her ladies gathered flowers on the green, had dreamed a cruel dream and been brought back to court weeping and tearing long red runnels into her face with her nails. She had said that in her dream a king in a crystal crown had come to her riding a white horse, he and all his knights wearing clothes as white as milk. He had taken her away to his fine palace with a hundred white towers, and told her that tomorrow she must return with them from under that same ympe-tree, to stay with him forever and a day. If she defied them, the fairy king said, they would tear her to pieces.

And so they had taken her the next day, although king Orfeo came with all his knights to guard the lady and the tree. She was there, and then she wasn't, although the blossom still fell from the tree on the green.

Next the king had gone too, off to the dark woods in his pilgrim's weeds, only his harp on his back.

"The ympe-tree from our own orchard was growing there?" I asked. "She had been sleeping there all these long years?"

"Perhaps," said the king. "Within the walls of Fairy, all men wear the manner of their coming. By fire or sword or childbed, as the case may be." He smiled again, a little grimly. "As to how I found her," he said, "I knew her by her clothes."

"Why not her face?" I almost asked. But he had turned aside to see to the horses.

 

\--

 

When he brought the queen back, I understood. She was sitting in a beggar's house, gnawing on a chicken bone. And she shone all over like freshly-cut gold. Her face was as white as whalebone. When she blushed, it was like water coming up under thin ice. She was very beautiful. She was, I understood, perfected. It did not seem likely that she would ever bear a human child.

But she still loved the king, that much was clear. She looked into his face like a prisoner seeing sunlight.

We brought her back to the castle with much rejoicing, in a procession with pipe and tabor. The sun was high and hot in the sky, and the downs rose above the city like the great green flanks of a breathing beast. Dust came up from the road and made my eyes itch. The people watching from doorways covered their mouths. The king and queen rode ahead of us all, as in the old days, saying things to each other that I could not hear.

That night there was feasting in the great hall, pike and goose and venison and a castle of marchpane. The queen turned her pale face to her lord and laughed lovingly, and she received our lords and barons with good cheer. She ate with a good appetite, fish and flesh and fowl. Every so often, I saw, the king and the queen would clasp hands, her fingers small and smooth and white and his all rough and gnarled. At the end of the meal, when the meat was bones and gristle and the marchpane castle walls had been knocked down, the king played his harp for us.

I say for us, but it was really for her. The notes came up through the smoke like a field of fair flowers, and curled round our feet like a river of jewels. All around the great hall, men stopped what they were doing and listened. Stocks and stones would have done the same. I cannot say what others heard, but the music told me of winterlong nights, when the stars streamed overhead and the forest was full of strange noises. It told me of the fairy court riding through the winter woods where the frost clung on the branches, and how their sweet high laugher hung in the air like icicles, waiting to snap. It told me of the moment when king Orfeo saw the queen riding in that company, and she saw him and wept for his wildness. How he ran after them through the chiming woods until his feet bled. How he reached the high walls of Fairy and tricked his way inside, how he played for the king in his crystal hall and won his wife back from the changeless lands, back to the world of meat and salt. How much he loved her, more than life itself.

When he had finished, I knew how the fairy king had felt. I would have given him anything, anything at all.

The queen was crying. And her tears, I saw, were not salt water, but tiny pearls. None of her ladies or the barons seemed to notice, although the king lifted his hand and wiped them away. Afterwards, I found them among the rushes, shining like winter stars or chips of ice.

Outside, summer rain was falling. The king had taken the queen to bed.

 

\--

 

The next morning, I went walking out in the orchard, to look at the ympe-tree. The morning had come in hot and grey, and a summer day was setting in. In the orchard, the air was close. I was hurrying, for I knew it would not be long before I was missed. We were crowning the king and queen again, and there was a great deal to be done. Already they were setting up banks of seats in the cathedral, with much sawing and hammering of sap-wet wood. At every step, the bruise on my thigh sent a little quiver of pain up through my body. I felt like a child pressing on a loose tooth.

I was not entirely surprised to find that the queen was already there. She was sitting under the ympe-tree and eating a hard green apple. Her ladies were walking at a distance, through the trees.

"Is all well, my lady?" I asked her.

"Good steward, I could ask the same of you."

Her voice was beautiful as well. I half expected jewels to come pouring out of her mouth to pile on the orchard grass.

"I dreamed about coming home here, you know," she said thoughtfully. "Back to our own orchard. Although, since there are no dreams in fairyland, perhaps I should say that I thought about it, often enough that it seemed like a dream."

"It has come true, though, my lady," I said. "Here you are."

"Here I am," she said. She bit into another tiny apple with her pearly teeth. "You know, steward," she said, "When you do not dream, it is hard to know when you are waking."

"Dreams have not always been kind to you, my lady," I said. "It was a dream that called you away from here."

She looked up at me. "Really?" she asked. "I'm afraid I don't recall."

Around her, the cores of little unripe apples littered the grass, like knucklebones.

 

\--

 

The king and queen were crowned in the cathedral on another perfect summer's day. He looked almost as fine as she did, and sweet singing shook the incense where it gathered in the vaulting, high above the crowds of people and the golden king and queen. Nothing so fine as the king's harp, of course. But then, what could be?

Summer day followed summer day, and the king and the queen kissed and colled like young lovers in dark corners. I came upon them once in an empty chamber, when he was clasping her to him as if he fed upon her kisses, as if he could consume her shining mouth. Neither of them noticed me, I believe.

The queen ate very well at table. She ate rice with almond milk and saffron. She ate spiced tartlets with honey. She ate chicken bones and capons, and the hard coffins of pies. Yet when I asked her if she was hungry, she would smile and shake her head.

 

Summer day followed summer day, and the crops grew high and were brought in. Apples struggled to ripeness and rotted in orchards. Every night it rained a gentle summer rain, coming in over the slopes of the downs like a grey cat settling round to sleep.

Men began to talk in the streets. Gossip collected in the corners of the cathedral, like gilt and dust round rich men's tombs.

Summer day followed summer day, and the leaves did not fall from the trees. The gentle rain fell at night and rotted them where they hung, still green.

The swallows did not fly, and later neither did the geese.

Meat set to salt in cool cellars grew green with mould, and barm overflowed the brew-pots down in the castle kitchens.

Sheep grew in their winter coats and died flyblown in the valleys.

 

Men came and talked to me. They could not plant the winter crops, they said, for they would rot in the warm earth. Their broad faces were hectic with hunger to come.

I would talk to the king, I told them. There was nothing, after all, that he could not do.

They looked up at the dais, for we were in the great hall after a rich meal, and they looked back at me with strained faces, pale as whey.

"Don't you see, master," said one of them, almost kindly. "Don't you see that it is him, no less than her?"

 

I looked up at the dais. The king and queen were sitting there, both looking very fine. They shone like gold cut open, and on the board before them lay joined their white smooth hands.

I must have made a noise, for the queen looked down at me. I cannot say what was on my face, but she saw it and nodded faintly, and turned to whisper in the king's white ear.

After a little while, he came down to greet me. "My lady says you would like me to play for you again," he said.

I nodded, I think, and he began to play. I could not tell how I had been so blind, for this music rose up in great shining sheets, like the doors to a land of unchanging time. Like men stuck wide with wounds that never closed, and meadows where the flowers never shut. Like a hunger for apples from an old ympe-tree, that fell only on the glass-green grass of fairyland. The music went through my heart like a needle of whale bone, so fine it never left a mark. It rose in towers and white pinnacles, and fell again in ropes of pearl. It was, truly, very beautiful, but it was not of this world.

 

\--

 

The next morning came in hot and grey. A summer day was setting in. Warm mist came up off the orchard grass as I waited by the gate, and the air was full of the smell of rotting apples, like bruise-sweet wine. My leg had been healed for months now, but I favoured it for a moment, for the sake of that old kind pain.

The king and queen came soon enough, holding each other by the hand. He had his harp upon his back.

"My lord. My lady," I said, and knelt.

King Orfeo took my hand and raised me up, and he kissed my cheeks two times. "I am sorry, loyal friend, I have tarried here, for years must turn and seasons end. And those of us who have gone outside must journey far, and venture wide." He shook his shining head a little, and smiled, quickly, a real smile. "After all," he said, "I did promise you the crown."

His wife pulled at his hand. "Come on, my love," she said. "Time to wake up."

They went into the orchard. I closed the gate behind them.

A little while later, a cold autumn breeze threaded through the trees. I shivered and turned back to the castle.

Under the ympe-tree, wet leaves fell quickly through the silent air.

 

 

 


End file.
